Wordpress (or other CMS)-how to do this?

I have a couple of specific ideas I'm considering. I've tried a few different services (joomla, typepad, etc) in the past and for now I'm going with wordpress unless someone can recommend a better CMS.

I don't have an example site but these types of things are nothing new. First, the home page is going to be static. That I can do myself. What I don't know how to do is to create multiple modules for that page.

The first idea involves two modules. The first one will include the latest news/updates/whatever. The second will be below the first and contain other content such as images.

My second idea is to have three modules. The first two should be side by side. The first one will again just have news updates, while the second will have links pointing to recently added content. You could say it would be similar to a side bar listing blog posts or new articles, but taking up less space. The third module will be the same as before-below everything else with its own content.

Here's where the technical issues are going to come in if I don't know what I'm doing beforehand. For the "News" module I only want it to show a single post at a time. All previous posts should be found on another page that will probably end up looking like a series of blog posts. The second module in the second example should only show links (may possibly include short descriptions later on). There should only be a specific number of links before the user is lead to a page with the full list.

With either set up the final module just needs to be kept from getting pushed down.

I hope this makes sense. I intend to start learning html and CSS, but for now I need something that I can get up and running with soon.